He also posted some trickiness with #defines to help do fixed-length loops when targeting your Pixel Bender kernels for Flash. Believe me, loops are on the agenda for Flash. We feel your pain. (Literally!)

Francois Tarlier posted some new useful Pixel Bender-based filters for After Effects. This one, his filmic look plug-in, is really nice.

This hasn’t been added to the schedule yet, it should be soon, but I wanted to give a heads up on this. I’m teaching a course on Pixel Bender this year, picking up from where my labs in 2008 left off. Here is the current description:So you’ve walked through the tutorials, added some filters to your display objects, maybe added a animating parameter or two, even written some of your own filters from scratch. What next? This lab will introduce you to topics like: optimizing your Pixel Bender and Actionscript code; using ShaderJobs to process data asynchronously; using Pixel Bender to process audio and other non-image data efficiently in your Flash movies; taking advantage of Pixel Bender parameter metadata; new Pixel Bender APIs in Flex4; and will give you a look under the covers to how Pixel Bender runtime works in Flash Player 10.1

I’d like your input on topics that you’d like me to cover. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

Also, in my previous labs, I used Flash Pro, this time I’d like to use Flash Builder, but I can go either way. Which would you prefer?

For those figuring out their MAX schedule, it looks like my lab will be on Monday at 5pm in room 402AB.

Update: The 90 minute session will be Wednesday, October 27 at 04:00PM in room 402AB. It is right at the end of MAX, so hopefully you will be able to attend.

If you are interested in attending my lab, please make sure that you at least are comfortable with the things I covered in my introductory tutorial.

I have a few conference talks and such in the next couple weeks, so I thought I’d send out some pointers.

If you are attending the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I’ll be speaking on a panel discussing how to educate the next generation of computer scientists for the new paradigms of parallel processing. The Panel is called “Parallelism and Education: Navigating Through a Sea of Cores”, the session is on Monday 9/13 at 11am, right after the keynote. I’ve written about this session last month.

On Tuesday, September 14th, around noon, I’ll be appearing live on Intel Software Network TV, you can watch here.

Later that evening, I’ll be hosting a Pixel Bender Meetup at 6pm at the Mars Bar in San Francisco. All Pixel Bender developers are welcome to join me and talk Pixel Bender. More info and directions here.

The next week, I’ll be speaking at the NVidia Graphics Technology Conference in San Jose. My session is on Thursday, September 23rd at 11am and it is called “GPGPU in Commercial Software: Lessons From Three Cycles of the Adobe Creative Suite.” More information here.

If you attending IDF or GTC or you’ll be in San Francisco on the 14th, come by and say “hi!” Otherwise, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to post video or slides from my sessions soon after.

Of course, I’ll be at MAX as well and may have some surprising things there, but I can’t talk about that yet 🙂

Hey, this will be the second time I’ve attempted this, last year in Portland went pretty great.

Here is your chance to ask questions, make feature requests, report bugs and talk to other Pixel Bender developers. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some other Adobe employees from my team and the Flash team to stop by as well.

We’ll be getting together at the Mars Bar, at 7th and Brannan, right around the corner from the Adobe SF offices where the Silicon Valley Flex User’s group meeting will start at 7pm.

This release fixes a number of bugs from the first CS5 preview release and also adjust the image size limits when GPU processing to let you work with larger images on graphics cards with more memory. See the release notes for more information.

Two new Tutorials crossed my browser this week for the Pixel Bender plug-in for CS5. Both about the Oil Paint filter. Now folks, the Oil Paint filter is pretty awesome, but you know that you can run lots of other filters in the Pixel Bender plug-in too, right? 🙂

One post that got people excited this week was the announcement of the Sambaverse alpha from Ben Gomez Farrell. This is Ben’s description of what he is trying to accomplish: “I needed a tool that was smart enough to load an MP3, take a good stab at automatically detecting beats, break, loud sections, and different sections of the song – like verses and choruses.” And Pixel Bender? “I used Pixel Bender to get a huge speed increase when loading the sound initially. That was a lot of fun once I figured out how to get it working.”

Color keying with Flash Builder 4 by Luis Estevez

Luis Estevez created a sample of using Pixel Bender to do color keying in the player. Here is his post in Spanish and English.

Here is an older link, but one I just came across this week, from David Van Brink’s Omino Pixel Blog: “Pixel Bender: A Gradient… and Some Math.” I really like how he digs into the math to explain how it works. A great blog, and a nice filter too!

It is pretty amazing that every week I have new links to post from Pixel Bender developers. I’m going to try and work in some of the old links that I’ve got too as I go too. More links next week!

An update of the Pixel Bender Toolkit is now available via the Adobe Updater and from the Pixel Bender Developer Connection area on adobe.com. If you have installed After Effects CS5, Flash Professional CS5 or one of the suites that includes these applications, you will see the update listed in the available updates. If you installed the Pixel Bender Toolkit via downloading it on from Adobe.com, you will need to download the update and install it by following the installation instructions.

The majority of effort in the release was on bug fixes found late in the CS5 development cycle. There have been some good bugs reported in the Pixel Bender forums, some are fixed in this release and some will be fixed in a later release.

There has been one major change in the behavior of the Flash preview in this release. In the 2.0 version of the Pixel Bender Toolkit, if you have a kernel with two inputs, the filter was treated as a Flash blend shader. This resulted in some unexpected results, especially when compared to CPU or GPU previews. Now, when you have a two input kernel, we instead create a ShaderJob and use the two input images as inputs. Hopefully, this will make things a bit more consistent. In a future version of the Toolkit, we plan to make this behavior selectable, but the blend case seemed to be very uncommon.

Thanks for using these tools and providing good feedback! If you find any problems or have feature requests, please post them to the Pixel Bender forums!